荀Xún子Zǐ · Xunzi

Xunzi (Xun Kuang, c. 310–235 BCE) is the third of the great early Confucians and Mencius's direct intellectual opponent. Where Mencius argued human nature is good (性善), Xunzi famously argued the opposite: human nature is bad (性恶), and only deliberate cultivation through ritual, learning, and law produces a good person. The disagreement is the central argument of classical Confucianism — and it didn't stay academic. Xunzi's two most famous students, Han Feizi and Li Si, took his emphasis on external constraint to its hard-edged conclusion and became the intellectual architects of Legalism and the Qin dynasty's harsh unification of China. So Xunzi is the bridge text between Confucianism and Legalism, and his work is read as much for that lineage as for its own arguments. The prose is more systematic and essayistic than the Lunyu or Mengzi — closer to a treatise than recorded sayings. Placeholder: the Chinese exists on ctext.org but is not yet ingested.